There are some very good reasons why the shot-clock cycle in NCAA basketball will remain at 35 seconds for the foreseeable future, but perhaps none better than was articulated to Sporting News by rules committee chair John Dunne, the head coach of the St. Peter’s Peacocks:

“If you make a rule change in one year just because there’s some outcry—you can’t go back.”

The members of the NCAA men’s basketball rules committee did discuss that outcry, and the most popular solution advocated by many in the game, at their annual meeting this week in Indianapolis. And they wisely decided to move cautiously in the push to make the game friendlier to offense.

It’s likely that the most obvious change for the 2013-14 season will be expanded use of instant replay. In the final two minutes of games—and all overtimes—officials will be able to use replay monitors to review shot-clock violations and out-of-bounds situations when multiple players are involved. Also, if there is uncertainty regarding the identity of a player who committed a foul, officials will be able to use a replay monitor to identify the player.

But if the committee’s meetings are to prove fruitful it will be the subtler moves they made that will matter most.

The average team in Division I this season scored 67.5 points per game, the lowest figure since 1952. That prompted many in the game to campaign for a change in the shot clock to 30 seconds—or perhaps even 24, the figure used by the NBA and FIBA. Among those pushing in that direction was Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, a six-time Final Four coach and a member of the National Association of Basketball Coaches' board.

The rules committee discussed the direction of the game both with the NABC board and the NCAA Tournament selection committee, and while there was a consensus about the appeal of correcting, as Dunne put it, “the imbalance between offense and defense,” there was no definite consensus about the likely efficacy of a change to a shorter shot clock.

“About half the coaches I talked to would say, ‘But the quality of shot is not going to be as good,’ ” Rick Byrd, head coach at Belmont and incoming chair of the rules committee, told Sporting News. “That stands to reason just as much as, ‘We’re going to get more possessions.’ ”

The committee was smart to recognize that the last change in the shot-clock cycle did not result in higher-scoring games. Teams averaged 73.6 points in 1992-93, the final year of the 45-second clock, and within four years of the change to 35, that figure had plunged to 70.19. The last time teams averaged 70 points was 2003.

Instead, the committee is pursuing changes in how the game is being officiated in order to give offenses a better chance.

The most obvious move is a redefinition of the charge/block call. In past years, a defender had to be in legal guarding position on an advancing ballhandler before he left the floor to attempt a shot. Now, the rules committee wants to make it so the defender “is not permitted to move into the path of an offensive player once he has started his upward motion with the ball to attempt a field goal or pass. If the defensive player is not in legal guarding position by this time, it is a blocking foul.”

The rules committee believes this will give officials more time to assess whether the call should be a charge or block.

“It’s a very high-degree-of-difficulty call,” Dunne said. “In our committee, any number of block/charges we can slow it down to slow motion and go around the room and be split 50/50 on whether it’s a block or charge.

“Although this is a slight difference, we’re hoping it can help referees … and hopefully (they’ll) maybe call blocks more so than call charges. If that can happen twice a game, it could result in another four points.”

The committee also will push for greater freedom of movement for offensive players by asking officials to call personal fouls more consistently, throughout the game and the season, in instances where defenders keep a constant hand or forearm on an opponent; when a defender places two hands on the opponent; when a defender jabs at an opponent by extending his arm and when any player uses an arm bar to interrupt an opponent’s movement.

“These probably were more incremental than what some people thought might happen, and thought should happen,” Byrd said. “When rules changes are made, it’s a little more difficult to write the rule in a real effective way than to have this hypothesis that we need better offense.”

Obviously, a lot of this falls onto officials to follow the course set for them by the rules committee. This isn’t the first time there have been directives to clean up physicality in the game. When he was chair of the rules committee in 2000, Roy Williams made a hard push in that direction and mostly met with resistance from coaches who saw him as promoting the interests of his own highly skilled, fast break-oriented teams.

As with many such situations, officials called the games more tightly for a while, then fell back into their own habits as they entered the comforts of conference play.

“It’s kind of part of the reason a few years ago we did away with points of emphasis,” the NCAA’s Ty Halpin, associate director of championships/playing rules, told Sporting News. “It became just something that worked early in the season and then sort of tailed off. The meeting John mentioned with the NABC board and the Division I committee, it was pretty powerful that the one common thread was that we need to clean up this stuff.”

Haplin said although “it might be painful,” NCAA officials coordinator John Adams and rules committee secretary/editor Art Hyland have “now been given the authority to take it and run with it and have the officials call those rules as written. They’re pretty clear, and they’re good rules.”